by D M Gilmore
The moment Duncan’s hands touched Esther, she squawked in fury and leapt into the air. Faster than the eye could easily follow, she darted around Smog, swiping through his expensive suit with her claws. He cried out in pain as the tiny dragon dug her talons into his cheek and raked them to his jaw, and tried to swat at the angry creature. Esther, however, was too fast, and darted out of the way in time, before returning to Asher and alighting on his shoulders.
“Dammit, Duncan,” Sangita hissed, leaping off the stage and pulling a pair of black batons out of the holsters on her hips. “I should have known there was an issue the moment it willingly allowed him to carry her. Look at the eyes, she is bound to him!”
“I’m a what to the who now?!” Asher said, glancing from Duncan to Sangita and back again.
“Bound?” Smog winced, dabbing at the wound on his face with a white kerchief that he pulled from his jacket pocket. The cloth came away red and sticky. “What the hell are you going on about, you never said anything about dragons being bound!”
“I was hoping to avoid the issue altogether,” Sangita hissed, levelling a baton in Asher’s direction, “but essentially the beast will only obey Asher. By extension, so long as you keep Asher alive and unharmed, you can use him to make his dragon obey you. If you don’t have Asher, you might as well not have the dragon.”
“What?!” Ruth and Asher said simultaneously. Ruth immediately dropped into a boxing stance, and Asher quickly readied a combat spell in his main hand.
Duncan’s eyes narrowed as he looked from Sangita, to Asher, and finally to the dragon on his shoulders. He was so close. So very close. The dragon was within reach, and yet for reasons he did not understand she was still so far. “Asher,” Duncan began, lowering his gun and shaking his head, “there’s an easy way we can do this. If you join up with me, join the Mountains, I promise you’ll be treated fairly. You have to understand, I’ve been working on this for years, and who knows when the next batch of eggs will be ready to hatch, or whether we’ll even be able to get in to steal one?” He laughed for a minute and shook his head again. “Asher, come on, be the smart kid I know you are and come with me. I’ll give you whatever you want. You want a lab? You want women? I’ll get it for you. You want revenge on Lovecraft? You can have that too.”
“Anything?”
“Anything, Asher,” Smog said, his voice a low hush. “You need to understand how important this is. This isn’t about something as simple as a product; this is the future of magic as we know it. We’ll be able to change the world, Asher, and all you need to do is join the Mountains.”
Asher held his breath and exchanged a look with Ruth. The offer was tempting, so tempting that every fibre of his being was screaming at him to say yes. Every fibre, save the one. One voice, telling him he couldn’t do it, shouting louder than all the others. “We’ve talked about this before,” he said in an equally low hush, turning back to face Smog with an almost apologetic look on his face, “you know I can’t join up with your gang.”
“Why, because it’s not the life you want for your walking wall of a brother? I’m not asking him to join, but if he had to follow you everywhere you know I would gladly take him,” Smog said, raising his voice. “God above, kid, have you met your brother? He scares people away just by looking at them. Imagine what he could do with the entire might of the Mountains backing him.”
“I won’t let my brother join a gang,” Asher growled, cracking his knuckles, “I promised our mother that I’d keep him safe. If I went with you,” he paused, and glancing at Ruth for a second, “if we went with you, I wouldn’t be able to keep that promise.”
“Dammit, Asher,” Ruth growled, shaking his head, “now is really not the time for this!”
“Look, I’m not asking him to join, I’m asking you,” Smog reiterated. “You want to keep your brother safe? Fine, I’ll pay you so much you’ll be able to afford to buy him a nice house outside the broodtown, problem solved. You’ll never have to worry about him again, he’ll spend the rest of his life in the lap of luxury.”
Asher looked from Smog to Ruth and back again, his mind racing with possibility. It was, without a doubt, a tempting offer, to the say the least. As badly as he didn’t want to join a gang, he couldn’t deny that Smog was really dangling a big juicy carrot in front of him. The issue Asher had was the stick. What would happen if he was asked to do something he didn’t want to do? Or if he disobeyed a direct order? Smog didn’t have a reputation as a forgiving drake.
Suddenly, Asher felt a pressure on the side of his head, and he looked over his shoulder and met eyes with Esther. She blinked up at him a couple times, as their matching yellow eyes stared into each other’s, and Asher felt a shiver go down his spine. In that moment, he knew two things with utmost certainty. The first, was that if he went with Smog, he could kiss any idea of having a normal career goodbye. Smog would never let him go, and he’d be the Mountains personal spellcrafter for the rest of his life. The second was that Esther really didn’t want to go with Smog.
“No deal,” Asher whispered, shaking his head and pulling himself up.
“What did you just say?” Duncan hissed, his voice a low hush.
“I won’t be going with you,” Asher said, pulling his fists in close to his body, the shield of shimmering mana tightening around him, becoming more solid.
Smog nodded in understanding, then proceeded to shake his head. “I really don’t get you, sometimes. You’ll do just about any job if you’re paid well, but when I offer you all the money you could ever need in exchange for coming with me, you turn me down?” He chuckled a bit, and levelled the gun at Ruth, shaking his head some more. Ruth once more assumed the don’t shoot me arms raised position. “Fine, we’ll do this the hard way. Come with me, or he dies.”
Asher couldn’t tell if he was making the right decision anymore. He didn’t care, the time for right decisions had long ago come and gone. If he hadn’t taken the job, if he hadn’t successfully stolen the orb, if he hadn’t shown up for the trade: hindsight did nothing to help them get out alive. So he did the one thing he knew he could do.
He cast Magic Missile.
Chapter 16
A bolt of silvery mana shot out of Asher’s right hand and arched gracefully through the air, making a b-line for Smog’s chest. The crimson drake’s eyes widened in fear, and a fraction of a second before the bolt hit, he pulled the trigger of his pistol, aiming directly at Ruth’s heart. The larger drake grunted in pain as his skin shimmered with a silver barrier, splintering the bolt and pushing him back a foot from the impact. Smog, on the other hand, was not so lucky. The Magic Missile struck him square in the chest, burning a hole through his expensive suit jacket and knocking him backwards through the air. He grunted in pain as he fell back to the floor, sliding a few feet across the stage, where he remained motionless. There was a pause as everyone held their breath, waiting to see if Smog would get back up. Asher could feel the drakes behind him tense, and he instinctively flexed the fingers of his left hand, readying his shield for the assault that was no doubt about to start.
Smog suddenly groaned in pain, but did not immediately sit up. “Don’t just stand there,” he hissed, “kill the scalers.”
Asher clenched his left fist as fast as he could, and heard a slew of mana charge pistols firing at his head, directly behind him. None of their bolts hit their mark, as the air behind him filled with rippling mana that encased him in a hemisphere of pulsing energy. A counter appeared within Asher’s field of view, his overall battery charge for the battery pack in his back pocket. Plenty of mana left, more than enough to outlast this fight. He whipped around to face his attackers, a cocky grin spreading across his face as they began to backpedal, putting some distance between them.
The instant the gunfire had gone off, all of it trained on Asher, Ruth lowered his arms and rushed to his brother’s defence, stepping between him and Sangita, who was approaching with menace in her eyes. Asher was focused on dealing with the
brunt of the gang, those with guns, who’d have punched holes in Ruth’s shield before he even had a chance to take them down. Sangita, however, was armed only with batons. That meant she’d be fighting primarily in close quarters, which was something he could definitely handle, though his shield wouldn’t be able to protect him. It was calibrated for the speed of gunfire, not slower moving sticks.
“Move,” Sangita hissed, raising her batons into a fighting stance, “or you will be moved!”
“Like hell I will, you pardrake trash,” he hissed right back, raising his fists into a boxing guard, with his right fists just below his jaw and his left just above his stomach. Batons and fists didn’t guard the same way, but he’d be damned if he just let her land a hit on him.
Sangita screeched something in a language that Ruth didn’t understand, and rushed at him with flaying batons that struck against his arms with a loud crack. Ruth gritted his teeth in pain, but held steadfast in his guard. The batons hurt, they must have been made of metal, but pain was temporary, and Ruth could take a lot of it. There was another sharp crack and Ruth felt the second baton bounce off his elbow, sending an electric pain jolting up his entire arm, numbing it as she quickly struck it with a pair of sharp jabs.
Asher ignored his brother’s fight, blocking out the sound of Ruth’s grunts of pain, making sure to keep his mana shield active. His younger brother would have to protect himself for now. From around his neck, Esther hissed angrily at the attacking drakes. Twelve drakes, three drakhunds, Asher remembered Ruth had said, as the bolts of mana and metal bullets ricocheted off his shield, their impact absorbed by the barrier. The entire club was alight with different coloured energy as the drakes all dove for cover, some ducking behind or inside the bar while others grabbed some of the tables that had been pushed off to the side and knocked them over, ducking behind them.
Two of Smog’s men stayed out in the open, their pistols trained on Asher’s body and firing every few seconds, but so far doing no damage. One with white scales, the other with green. Asher smirked to himself as he instinctually cycled through the spells in his right watch. He had an entire array of combative spells for a dozen different scenarios, but there was one that he had yet to effectively test. Theoretically, it would shoot a bolt of lightning from his fingertips. Now seemed like a good time to test it.
Asher raised his palm outwards towards the two drakes, and an arc of electricity shot from his hand, splintering into forks that struck both the ground and the light fixtures before finally striking the freestanding drakes, who dropped immediately to the ground, motionless. All at once, the lights turned dark, and sparks flew from the fixtures that Asher had accidentally hit with his blast. Asher cursed to himself, as he realized he had just made aiming harder for himself, but his shiny shield made him a beacon for the Mountains to see.
Ruth had been blocking Sangita’s hits for the better part of a minute, and the rusty orange scales on his arms had turned black with bruises as proof of his pain. He could feel a fracture in his left arm, barely formed but threatening to turn into a full break if he continued to block with it, and so he held it close by his side and tried instead to dodge rather than outright block. Sangita, however, was faster than he was. He grunted as he took another blow to the shoulder, and figured it might have something to do with all the bulk he was carrying around.
Sangita moved with a fluid grace, her body bending in ways that Ruth couldn’t even begin to imagine as she swept in with her batons and struck him in the legs, the tail, the ribs, before finishing the combo with a blow to his head.
Ruth stepped backwards, his right eye swollen shut, his vision blurry, as all of a sudden the lights in the building went out. Sangita must have been just as surprised as he had been, because she faltered in her step, and Ruth saw an opportunity to salvage this fight. For the first time since starting to fight her, he was able to reach out with his good arm and catch one of her batons in his open palm, gripping it tightly and taking a few steps forward for good measure. The baton in her other hand cracked loudly against his horn, which rattled his entire skull, but otherwise he felt no pain as he twisted Sangita’s arm and stepped around her, bending her arm behind her back.
Sangita hissed in pain and released the baton, exactly as Ruth had expected. He may not have been an expert in magic like Asher, or a master fighter like Sangita, but Ruth had been in his fair share of brawls, and had managed to learn a few things along the way. Without giving her a second to turn around, Ruth cracked Sangita over the head with her own baton, bending the metal rod into a useless shape with the force of the impact. He felt bone crunch, and watched one of Sangita’s horns fly off her head. He cast the damaged weapon aside with a chuckle.
“You filthy, unwashed animal,” Sangita growled, turning to face him with a sneer in her eyes. The red emergency lights suddenly flickered on, and Ruth got a good look at the damage he had caused. Her right horn had been splintered at the base, and there was a gash along the side of her face where bone and metal shards had torn through it. She was bleeding just above her right eye, a dark and angry mirror to Ruth’s own swollen face. “I’m going to make you hurt, for that!”
As soon as the red emergency lights had come back on, the gunfire had resumed, and Asher was forced to buckle down on his shield, now that the gangsters could see him again, as they peeked out from behind their cover and fired a few loose shots at his shield. He was down to 70 percent of his battery, and debated risking another blast of lightning, but the last shot had drained nearly ten percent by itself. To keep casting it would be unsustainable. Instead he switched to a different spell. A spinning chain of red energy shot from his outstretched palm and grabbed one of the tables that a drake had been using for cover. With a whip of his arm, the table flew backwards, taking the drake with it. The table hit a wall and splintered, while the drake collapsed to the ground and didn’t get back up.
This was too slow and left him too much of a target, he quickly realized, as more drakes peaked out from their cover to rain a volley of bolts down on his shield, knocking it below 60 percent. Asher fired two more missiles, knocking one target hiding in the bar into the air before blasting him straight into the shelf of booze. This drake slumped to the floor, his back filled with glass shards and alcohol.
Suddenly, Asher became aware of a barking sound. His eyes widened in fear as three scaly, dog-like shapes rushed out from the other side of the bar. He quickly fired a missile at one, but it was moving too fast, and he missed his mark. The drakhunds ran at full sprint through the club, their mouths frothing in fury, their eyes glowing red in the dim lights. They could get through his shield, Asher realized, quickly cycling through his spells in the hopes of finding something that worked. He waved his hand, and the air around him grew cold as crystals of ice began to form along the floor. The drakhunds slipped a little bit, but dug their talons into the tile and maintained their traction, continuing their rapid advance.
They were too slow to be stopped by his shield, but too fast for him to hit.
He was screwed.
Esther suddenly squawked in fury and leapt from his shoulder, flying out over the drakhunds faster than they could run. Asher watched in awe as the sapphire dragon opened her mouth, and a very familiar arc of lightning shot out, striking two drakhunds at close range and leaving smoking corpses in her wake. The third drakhund, smelling its cooked companions, whimpered in fear before running off in the other direction, its scaly tail between its legs.
“Holy shit!” Asher shouted in excitement. “You can breathe lightning?!”
Esther curved in the air around him before again alighting on his shoulders and coiling around his neck. Once more she opened her mouth, but instead of lightning spewing out, a familiar hemisphere of energy surrounded them. Asher’s eyes widened in surprise and astonishment, and he had a difficult time containing his giddiness.
“You’re not breathing lightning,” he realized in excitement, “you’re copying my spells!”
With only one baton in her hand, Sangita was a far easier opponent to deal with. She very rarely lashed out with her free hand, and whenever she did, Ruth would block it easily, while carefully sidestepping the baton. The blow to the head must have really hurt, too, because she was slowing down, the blows she did land being far weaker than the ones she had landed previously. She was getting tired, and it showed on her face. Ruth smirked, figuring he must have given her a concussion with that blow to the head. He just had to hold out a little longer, and he’d be the winner.
“You think you’ve won?” Sangita asked, narrowing her good eye at Ruth in disgust. “One hit does not a winner make.”
“I’m not much for fancy words and sayings,” Ruth grumbled, sidestepping yet another blow to his head and returning it with a punch to her stomach. Sangita grunted in pain before taking a step back, her lips dripping with blood. “I let my fists do my talking for me. Right now they’re saying give up.”
“Me? Give up? I have you right where I want you, brute,” Sangita chuckled, pointing to the ground.
In a moment of confusion, which he would curse himself for the rest of his life, Ruth looked down at the ground. He didn’t know what he expected, maybe a big red X and an anvil to fall out of the sky, but instead he saw nothing. He looked up again just in time to see Sangita’s baton come crashing down on his snout. There was another loud crack, and Ruth felt the bone in his snout break as his sense of smell filled with blood. He coughed and sputtered, spitting out a few red globules, while his vision danced and swam.
“Idiot,” Sangita chuckled, before swinging in with a roundhouse kick that left her talons firmly embedded in his thigh. “I cannot believe you fell for that.”
With Esther maintaining his shield, Asher was free to use more spells. He quickly switched his left watch over to his force blast spell, and began making short work of the eight remaining drakes. Whenever one would duck behind a table for cover, Asher would shatter it to splinters with a condensed blast of air from his left hand, before knocking the drake unconscious with a well aimed Magic Missile to the face or chest.
